Thirst for Love Read Free

move in with the father. He knew that although his chronic asthma permitted him to live in idleness and escape the draft, it did not exempt him from voluntary service—a duty he took the initiative of choosing by having his father secure him a post with the Maidemmura post office. He moved in with his wife in tow, and it seemed certain that some kind of friction would develop, but Kensuke slid out from under his proud father’s absolute power with ease. In this feat his talent for cynicism served him well.
    As the war got worse all three of the gardeners were called up, but one of them, a youth from Hiroshima prefecture, managed to have his younger brother, just out of grade school, take his place. That boy, named Saburo, was being brought up in the Tenri sect; for the big festivals in April and October he would leave to meet his mother and, dressed in a white happy coat with the word Tenri on the back, would go to worship at the Mother Temple.
    * * * *
    Etsuko placed her shopping bag on the doorstep as if she were listening to determine what sound it made; then she peered into the dark room. The child’s laughter went on and on. Now that Etsuko could hear more clearly she realized the child was not laughing, but crying, rocking himself in the darkness of the deserted room. Asako seemed to have put him down while she cooked. She was the wife of Yusuke, who had not yet returned from Siberia. She had come here with her two children in the spring of 1948, exactly a year before Yakichi asked the widowed Etsuko to join them.
    Etsuko started toward her six-mat room, but as she approached it she was surprised to see a light gleaming from above the partition. She did not recall that she had left a light burning.
    She opened the sliding door. Yakichi was sitting at the desk engrossed in reading something. He seemed flustered when he looked up and saw his daughter-in-law. Etsuko realized that the red, leather-backed book he had been reading was her diary.
    “I’m home,” she said, in a clear, cheerful voice. Her look and her reaction to what she had come upon were quite different from what one might have expected. Her voice, her movements were lithe as a maiden’s. This husbandless woman was a human being to be reckoned with.
    “Welcome home; you’re late, aren’t you,” said Yakichi, who might with more honesty have said: “You’re early.”
    “I’m starved—while I was waiting I borrowed your book.” The book he held up was a novel he had substituted for the diary; it was a translated work Kensuke had lent Etsuko. “It was too tough for me; I didn’t understand a word.”
    Yakichi was wearing the old knickerbockers he wore in the fields, a military-style shirt, and an old vest from one of his business suits. His dress was what it had been for a long time, but the almost servile humility with which he comported himself was a tremendous alteration from what he had been during the war, before Etsuko knew him. There was also the decline in his physique, the loss of power in his glance. The once proudly closed lips seemed to have lost the power of coming together; when he spoke, flecks of spittle appeared at the corners of his mouth.
    “They were all out of pomelos. I looked all over for them, too, but couldn’t find any.”
    “That’s too bad.”
    Etsuko sank to her knees on the tatami and slipped her hand inside her sash. She felt the warmth of her abdomen after the walk; her sash caged the heat like a hothouse. She sensed the perspiration running on her breast. It was a dark, cold sweat, heavy as sweat shed in sleep. It swirled around her, cold though it was, seeming to scent the air.
    Her whole body felt constricted by something vaguely discomforting. Then she suddenly slumped to the tatami . Someone who did not know her well might have misinterpreted the attitude her body assumed at times like this. Yakichi had many times mistaken it for seductiveness. It was motivated, however, simply by something that